Dan Jones | Vaudeville Post

Vaudeville Stays on Spec with NUGEN Audio

Vaudeville Stays on Spec With NUGEN Audio Loudness Meters

by Daniel Jones, Managing Director, Vaudeville

Vaudeville are specialists in creative audio for broadcast. They are unique in providing equipment, management, supervision, and staffing for any broadcast audio postproduction project within production companies. Their studios complete a full range of broadcast audio post production work on both longform and shortform projects, including full Dolby E 5.1 surround mixes. Across their various studios they output over 400 hours of programming a year.

With the adoption of the ITU-R BS. 1770 standard in the U.S., the EBU R128 standard in Europe, and similar standards in other parts of the world. Vaudeville, as all broadcast specialists, is bound by the technical specifications of the broadcast channel. Most of our output has had loudness requirements in place for quite a while.

To help us stay on spec, we’ve been using NUGEN Audio’s VisLM visual loudness meter and the LM-Correct loudness measurement and correction tool in all of our studios since 2011. Our sound engineers use the Avid Pro Tools® audio production platform, and we mix everything according to defined templates. VisLM and LM-Correct are plug-ins that we were able to incorporate easily into our existing templates. The fact that we could adapt them quickly to our settings is one of the things that really sold us on the products. All we had to do was fix the settings within the plug-in, select them.
VisLM is visually much easier to follow than any other product we’ve used, and we can adapt the display to look exactly how we want – which is important when you’re constantly looking at the screen. There aren’t many other meters that allow you to customize like that. As for LM-Correct, we weren’t aware of any other such plug-ins before we started using it. It quickly became a vital tool for us because we love the confidence of being able to measure the mixed WAV file.

We also just started using NUGEN Audio’s new ISL True Peak limiter, which gives us complete control over peak levels in audio signals from mono to 5.1 by measuring intersample peaks and allowing us to set the true-peak limit. The metering is constantly going, so we can refer to it at any moment and make tweaks in real time. The great thing about ISL is that, like VisLM and LM-Correct, you can set it and forget it. We implement the ISL True Peak limiter on the main outputs of every mix session. We’ve just completed mixes for upcoming series on Sky Atlantic and BBC, and the final output was so clean it was practically see-through. It’s a better product than any we’ve tried.

We use NUGEN Audio tools in every mix session across the board. They look great, they completely do the job they say they can do, they’re well-priced in the market, and they’re simple to use.